Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.

Governing the Nation's Schools: The Case for Restructuring Local School Boards

Abstract: Ms. Danzberger recommends reforms that will actually re-create local boards so that they can become influential forces for change and improvement. Without such reforms, she points out, attacks on school boards will continue and escalate, thus diminishing what credibility boards have maintained. Local school boards are among the most venerable of U.S. public institutions, embodying many of our most cherished political and cultural tenets. One of these is a distrust of "distant" government that dates back to Colonial times, when Americans were ruled from afar by governments that had little knowledge of the Colonial experience and no knowledge of local conditions. Lay school boards are also valued because of Americans' ambivalence regarding experts and expertise. This profound ambivalence accounts for much of the motivation to elect laypeople to make local education policy and for the expectation that they will act as buffers between citizens and the possible "excesses" of professional educators. Historical experience also explains Americans' fondness for keeping school boards independent of units of general government. In the late 19th century, city school boards, controlled by the political ward system, were patently corrupt. This corruption led in the first two decades of this century to a major movement to reform school governance. The familiar form of school governance - a central board for each district with a professional chief executive, the superintendent - emerged from these reforms. The current grassroots commitment to separating the governance of education from general purpose government in order to keep education out of the hands of "ordinary politicians" is rooted in these almost century-old reforms. The governance system for the nation's schools evolved over more than 200 years, starting in Massachusetts when local selectmen determined that running both towns and schools in expanding communities was too great an administrative burden. Although states increasingly provided for a statewide system of primary and secondary schools in their constitutions, they did not immediately establish a state governance structure specifically for education. It was not until 1837 that the first state board of education and the office of state superintendent were established (another first for Massachusetts). Local control remained preeminent, although the innate public suspicion of state control manifested itself frequently in complex layers of legislation that carefully defined local prerogatives. Today, the governance system for public schools is complex, incorporating multiple players and decision makers, including federal and state courts, the U.S. Congress, state governors and legislatures, and so on. These policy makers often respond to the concerns of the unofficial players in education policy: special interest groups, the business community, and groups of citizens who want their perspectives reflected in the policies governing schools. Even at the local level, the school board is not the only local institution whose decisions determine what will or will not occur in schools. Teacher and administrator unions, principals and teachers in individual schools, and, increasingly, planning or governing bodies in individual schools all make decisions or share authority once lodged with the school board. Unquestioning acceptance of school boards, as currently structured, cannot be equated with protecting local control, for local control is increasingly diffuse. Thus the issue is not local control, as many defenders of the status quo would have us believe, but how to ensure an effective central policy-making body for public education at the local level. Citizens can continue to exercise some control over the education of their children and the expenditure of their tax dollars, while also providing for effective leadership and governance of the schools, through reformed and strengthened school boards. …

Controlling new drugs under marketing regulations

Abstract: Aims The rapid emergence of myriad substances openly marketed as ‘legal highs’ is straining traditional drug control systems which require time and basic scientific data on harms to react, presenting governments with the dilemma of no response or a disproportionate response. Some countries have side-stepped this using novel policy and legislative approaches. Should other countries consider them? Methods We review the different laws invoked to stop the open sale of new psychoactive substances, focusing on the European Union (EU). Results Some countries have designed new catch-all control systems, or faster systems to classify substances as drugs. Others have enforced consumer safety or medicines legislation to stop the open sale of these products. The latter originate from harmonization of the internal market of the EU. Rigorous, objective evaluation is required, but first results suggest that these have been effective, while avoiding criminalization of users. Conclusions Every EU country should have existing laws for protecting public health that can be applied swiftly yet proportionately to new drugs appearing on the open market with minimum political involvement. It seems the key is the speed, not the weight, of response. Given support for their enforcement mechanisms, these systems might be as effective and more efficient than the old ones.

Post-2000 Law-based Educational Governance in Israel: From Equality to Diversity?

Abstract: This article analyses patterns of post 2000 governance in Israel’s education system. Drawing upon literature on educational regimes, governance in neo-liberal societies (for example, the UK and the USA), law-based educational reform and policy analysis, this study sets out to inquire how Israel’s system was governed with minimal legislation for 60 years. The main theme that emerges is that, although the forces that govern Israel’s landscape are similar to those in many post-industrialist western countries, the processes are quite different due to lack of decisive school reform, thus offering potential for a diverse setting, but with increasing distance from former equalizing and de-segregative vigour that portrayed the system in the past.

The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation

Abstract: The proliferation of state and local regulation designed to control immigrant movement has generated media attention and high-profile lawsuits in the last year. Proponents and opponents of these measures share one basic assumption with deep roots in constitutional doctrine and practice - immigration control is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. As a result, assessments of this important trend have failed to explain why state and local measures are arising in large numbers, and why the uniformity both sides seek is neither achievable nor desirable. I argue that is time to come to a modus vivendi regarding participation by all levels of government in the management of migration. To do so, I provide a functional account of sub-federal immigration regulation and demonstrate how the federal-state-local dynamic operates as an integrated system to manage contemporary immigration. The primary function states and localities play is to integrate immigrants into the body politic and thus to bring the country to terms with demographic change. This process cannot be managed by a single sovereign, and it sometimes depends on states and localities adopting positions in tension with federal policy. Given these dynamics, I offer a reformulation of existing federalism presumptions. These will not be primarily for application by courts, though courts should abandon constitutional or strong field and obstacle preemption theories in immigration cases. Instead, I offer a framework for federal and state lawmakers intended to restrain their impulses to preempt legislation by lower levels of government, and to create incentives for cooperative ventures in immigration regulation. Counterintuitively, the changes wrought by globalization demand strong institutions beneath the national level. Immigration highlights this convergence of the transnational and the local. Only by assimilating our understandings of immigration federalism to this realization can we explain and harness the value of state and local regulation.